AstrotalkUK

Not for profit website/blog on astronomy, space and my writing

Episode 64: Bangalore Astronomical Society

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BAS Coorg Start Party 27 Mar 2011 Photo credit- BAS

Another episode in the current series about space and India. Bangalore Astronomical Society (BAS) is probably the most industrious astronomical societies in India. Founded in 2006, it has nearly 200 paid up members based in and around Bangalore but a huge number of national and international followers online.

In this episode, BAS president Naveen Nanjundappa, describes BAS‘s origins, achievements and future goals.

I have added a few links below – if you have others worth sharing please submit via a comment.

Google Group is the primary online platform but BAS has a presence on Events Announcement Group, Orkut Community, Facebook Group and of course Twitter.

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Episode 63: Rakesh Sharma India’s first and only spaceman

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Rakesh SharmaWith a population of 1.2 billion people, India has just one national with first hand experience of spaceflight. Rakesh Sharma, a now retired Indian Air Force wing commander in 1984 spent eight days in space aboard the Soviet space station Salyut 7. This account of his spaceflight was recorded at this home in the Nilgris region of India in August 2013.

MP3 audio below and Youtube video below that

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Episode 62: Vikram Sarabhai

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Amrita Shah

Vikram Sarabhai  is unanimously accepted across India as the “father” of its space program. Not really known well outside India, he died suddenly and prematurely at age of 52 in 1971. He had studied cosmic ray physics and gained his PHD from Cambridge in 1947 the same year India became an independent nation.  He spent the rest of his life implementing a vision that the prosperity of India and all of its people lay in science. The scientific institutions he built still play key role in India today. Convincing the Indian population that they had the intellectual capacity to rebuild India with their own hands is perhaps his lasting legacy.

The most scholarly biography on his eventful life is Vikram Sarabhai – A life by Amrita Shah. A review of the book is available here. This episode is a recording with Amrita Shah conducted fittingly at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where Vikram Sarabhai studied physics under C V Raman who in 1930 had won the Nobel Prize for physics.

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Episode 61: Reg Turnill on Wernher von Braun

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Reg Turnill wit von Braun
Reg Turnill with Wernher von Braun 1977

Like so many in the “space community” I was saddened to hear of the passing of Reg Turnill. He was  the BBC’s aerospace correspondent but is  best known  for covering the American Space program  throughout the 60s and 70s that he documents so well in his book Moonlandings: An eye witness account.

He was the BBC’s representative in Moscow at Gagarin’s post flight press conference and told me in episode 41 of his experience when I went to meet him in January 2011.

Reg captures the ambiguity of the brilliant Wernher von Braun who he got to know so well that he called him a friend and yet believed that he was a war criminal and should have been hanged.

In this 30 minute podcast , the first a six minutes is  telephone conversation recorded on 3rd November 2011 followed by extracts from his talk at the UK Space Conference 5th July 2011 “The von Braun that I knew”. Reg shares three of his audio interviews with von Braun, the audio quality of the 2nd and 3rd is better than the first.

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